Spawn protection prevents players from building around world spawn, undoing any attempts at placing or breaking blocks.
Description
Spawn protection only exists in dedicated servers and does not apply in singleplayer worlds or LAN worlds. Spawn protection only applies in the Overworld, since the world spawn is always in the Overworld.
The spawn-protection field in server.properties determines the side length of the square spawn protection area as 2x+1. Setting this to 0 or a negative value disables the spawn protection. A value of 1 protects a 3×3 square centered on the spawn point, 2 protects 5×5, 3 protects 7×7, etc. The area that it protects is (spawn-protection×2 + 1)×(spawn-protection×2 + 1).
Operators (in the ops.json) can bypass the spawn protection.
If there are no operators at all in the server, spawn protection does not apply.
There are several indirect ways to bypass spawn protection, namely activating pistons, dispensers, explosives and using mob griefing.
History
| Java Edition Beta | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1.3 | Added spawn protection. The radius is always 16 (protecting a 33×33 area). | ||||||
| Java Edition | |||||||
| 1.4.2 | 12w40a | Added spawn-protection to server.properties.
| |||||
| Spawn protection no longer applies if the server does not have any ops. | |||||||
| 1.5 | 13w05a | Setting spawn-protection to 0 now disables spawn protection, instead of protecting a 1×1 area.[1] | |||||
| 1.8 | 14w17a | Added the world border. It is stated that terrain outside of this border should be treated the same as spawn protection, although the implementation is flawed. | |||||
Issues
Issues relating to "Spawn protection" are maintained on the bug tracker. Issues should be reported and viewed there.
